Discussions

Many of you may have read about TheServerSide Symposium last week through the excellent blog coverage provided by Cameron, Cedric, and others. In this article TSS summarizes many of the great technical sessions, panels, and keynotes at the Symposium. Links have also been provided to various blogs that covered the event.

Day 2
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-J2EE Myths and Why They're Dangerous
-Patterns Frameworks $ Micro-Architectures
-JavaBlogs.com : The movement, the site, the technology
-Java Keyote: Where We are and Where We're Going as an Industry and Community
-The Future of J2EE Panel
-TheServerSide Beer Tent Party

I was attending Rod's talk at the time Sean's talk was scheduled. But, if you are interested in the summary of Sean's talk, then here it is (from Sean's slides): [The symposium attendees have slides from almost all the talks; you indeed missed attending the symposium! Plan for early bird special next year.]

I think a lot of people where very sad this year about how JavaOne had been turned into SunOne especially compared to previous years. Since I had already been to JavaOne I could not attend both. I am definately on the look out for a more vendor independent event next year so this may be an option.

However Boston is a little far for me compare to the the San Francisco Moscone which is a block away. I wonder why they selected Boston.

They probably chose Boston because it's far away from San Francisco. Not everyone lives in SF, so it's nice to have an event on the East Coast once in a while and make people from CA have to travel for once. :-)

I did not push any Macromedia products at all, but judging from the questions I fielded after I spoke, I think the most successful part of my talk was the demo I put together showing JavaServer Faces producing a Flash-based Datagrid bound to a server-side JavaBean property. It was displayed on a JSP that also contained HTML widgets bound to the same server-side JavaBean instance. So the rich Flash component (a richer data grid that can be had with page-based table approaches, I daresay) was produced using custom tags, and shared the same Java-based data model as the JSP. It ran on Tomcat, not JRun (nothing up my Macromedian sleeve), and took advantage of Flash's local data store to work offline as well as while connected.

Before that demo, I explained what an RIA is and how various server-side patterns apply to RIA development on the client (using DAO's for example, to access local client-side data storage).

I also spent some time talking about SOA, and how rich clients in a service-oriented architecture essentially allow clients to behave as nodes in a workflow, or service and messaging endpoints, etc. In talking with some of those working with messaging and business processes, this struck a chord; in talking with most others, I got some skeptical and/or blank stares. Which is good to know. Personally, I think business process components and async messaging will be a heck of a lot more impactful than the RPC SOAP stuff that's going on in terms of web services, and it also stands a better chance of growing the J2EE platform than does other suggested new stuff. Only a minority opinion, your mileage likely varies.

I enjoyed the conference, but I was a bit surprised by a couple of negative things. Some of the venom in the EJB and AOP conversations, for instance; on both sides, I picked up a good' deal of over-statement and silver bullet talk, seasoned with testosterone-fueled ego and seemingly far removed from mainstream corporate development. I was also a little put off by by just how much certain very intelligent folks really do despise the JCP -- I have *plenty* of issues with it, too, despite sitting on the JCP EC and contributing to various expert groups, but I discovered that most of those who hate the process the most are those who never apply to participate at all, who don't have suggestions for updating it that can be acted upon, and who don't actually bother to learn what's going on in the JCP before telling others what they imagine is going on. This should probably not be surprising. Still, I think I did translate some of the fury and bile into reasonable suggestions that I can take back. The process does need improvement, no doubt, but it's getting there.

I also left with a couple of things to learn more about: I have to try Hibernate, for instance, as I was really impressed by those folks. I also want to do some customer visits and learn if the Java web developer really does want the half dozen VS.NET clones that Java vendors are demoing these days, which we saw at JavaOne as well as at this Symposium. I'm not so sure, but then I don't build Java IDEs.

As usual, the best bits weren't the sessions, but the conversations. Any chance to chat with folks like John Crupi, Kyle Brown, etc. is a good thing.

"Windows Explorer. In JBoss any component EJB, WAR, EAR, JAR,
Datasource, AOP can be dragged and dropped into the deploy directory or out
of it."

> > He [Bill Burke of JBoss] had an existing class running
> > in Tomcat and added the tracking aspect by simply dragging
> > and dropping the pre-defined aspect onto the class.
>
> This sounds extremely interesting! What tool was he using to do this?
>
> /T

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